One time, I was at Wal-Mart at like 3 am (the only time to go) and suddenly a whole squad of police SWAT guys come STORMING in, riot shields and all, and proceeded to do bomb clearing in the middle of the store. I, being the lackadaisical semi-suicidal sort that I am, proceeded to carry on with my shopping, because I assumed that if it WAS a real bomb clear, there probably would have been some sort of announcement over the intercom.

La la la, doo dee doo doo doo, I pay for my shit and leave and don't think any more of it.

Sure enough, front page of the local newspaper the next day was "BOMB SCARE AT LOCAL WAL-MART", and apparently it was an actual bomb scare and nobody bothered to actually act as if it was. The police didn't even bother to tell me that I was in the middle of a suspected bomb impact zone.

I didn't GROW UP in Leavenworth, but it was part of my summer routine. Goin' to spend a week with the grandparents in Wenatchee, goin' to eat at that damn rathskeller restaurant they have in Leavenworth.

Oh man, the McCarthy moments were pretty classic. He was one of the most deeply evil men in history, AND YET I don't think of him as a villain. The similarities in personal life between Adolf Hitler and Walt Disney are quite remarkable: World War I vets who fancied themselves "artists" yet required other, more talented people to do their work for them, both of them deeply autocratic and increasingly grandiose as the years went by.

Disney's employee stratification system was basically a system of patronage and rewards of fealty to Walt himself. Those who remained "loyal" were rewarded with access to a private lunchroom and choice of assistants, as well as more freedom to dink around on Walt's dollar.

The remake of "Orphan's Benefit" coincided with the strike, wherein scab labor from various other studios was hustled in and various projects were hamfistedly wedged into production to prove the point that the studio was going to continue production with or without Babbitt and his union supporters. This cartoon involved literally TRACING a previous cartoon, just to keep the scab labor occupied.

Eventually, Walt had a very well suppressed nervous breakdown during the strike, during which time he actually hired one of Capone's ex-goons to muscle the ringleaders and threaten them to come back to work. The cartoonists were driven out to the desert and threatened at gunpoint to end the strike. When they got back, they decided that it was just bluff, and kept striking. Walt snapped and Roy had him shipped off to South America to publicize the Three Caballeros pictures, during which time Roy solved the damn strike in less than 48 hours.

When he returned, Walt was a crushed man who moped around for a decade, hanging out with Ronald Reagan and finally he started planning Disneyland, at which point he mentally checked out of the animation business altogether. This is why Disneyland is as Freudian as it is.

Walt's anti-Union megalomania was so great by the time of the remake that he did this so posterity would look back at what he felt was his best Mickey Mouse cartoon and NOT have Art Babbitt's name in the credits.

A testiment to Walt's midwestern sensibility that his favorite episode was also the most boring...

Yeah, that was after about two years of Nintendo continually pushing back the release date so as not to conflict with other franchise releases. Conker's Bad Fur Day is a fantastic example of why creative people should be allowed time to actually do things.